by Dom Joly
I was joking about my friend on the train thinking that all foreigners must be going to Nagasaki but this actually used to be the case. The city was ‘opened’ to the world by the Portuguese in 1571. It was a flourishing trading port and the centre for all Christian missionaries in Japan. In 1641, however, Christianity was banned and the Portuguese were chucked out of the country. Japan’s only connection to the outside world was the Chinese settlement in Nagasaki and some Dutch merchants who were quarantined on Dejima Island in Nagasaki Bay. This alienation from the outside world lasted for 200 years and made Nagasaki far more liberal and cosmopolitan than the rest of medieval Japan. I was expecting great things from the place and hoped that I might stumble on a monster story or two.
I found a hotel called the Monterey. A whole section of the city was built in a European style by the foreigners who lived there after being released from their island exile. I dropped my bag off and immediately set off for some more atomic tourism. Surprisingly the museum and hypocentre aren’t in the centre of the city but are in Urakami, a little suburb to the north. Cabs in Japan are eye-wateringly expensive and my experiences in them so far hadn’t been wonderful, so I opted for the tram. We headed through Chinatown and started trundling up towards Urakami, where the bomb exploded at 11.02 a.m. on 9 August 1945 – three days after Hiroshima.
I remembered the terrible story of a man who had been on business in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. He was wounded but survived and managed to make his escape from the devastated city. He headed for home – you guessed it: Nagasaki. He arrived there just in time to be hit by the second bomb, which he also survived. He’d only recently died.
So, I was off to my second atomic memorial site in a day. I hopped off the tram, crossed a big road and entered a park -and within seconds was standing at the spot above which the bomb went off.
The A’ target city had been Kokura. Lucky old Kokura, however, had been too cloudy so, after making a couple of circles, the plane headed for the secondary target, Nagasaki. The drop site was supposed to be the centre of town, near my hotel, but there was more cloud here and the pilots were by now very low on fuel. Then they spotted the Mitsubishi factory that was situated in this industrial suburb and dropped the bomb there instead. Because Urakami lies in a valley, the centre of the city was spared the very worst effects of the bomb. That’s why there’s much more left of ‘original’ Nagasaki than there is of Hiroshima.
The hypocentre memorial features a big black column shooting up into the sky surrounded by a set of concentric rings spreading out like the ripples of a blast wave. Right next to it are the remains of the Catholic cathedral that was completed in 1925 and had, until it was vaporized, been the largest in the Orient. I looked up into the sky above and tried to imagine that moment. There would have been no sirens wailing: this was a lone plane and wouldn’t have been seen as a threat. The city would have gone from total normality to an inferno of hell in a millisecond.
I climbed the nearby steps to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. As I entered the foyer a woman approached me and asked me if I needed a guide. I politely said no and tried to move on but she seemed not to understand and started ushering me towards a door on the right.
‘Thank you, but I am happy to be alone,’ I said, smiling and half-bowing.
‘I learn English and am honour to be my guide for your tour.’ She bowed back and almost pulled me towards the door.
‘I really do not need a guide, but thank you for your most kind offer.’ I bowed again, slightly lower, smiled again and tried to move in the other direction.
‘Gratuities will of course be at your discretion; we am volunteer guide but we am also housewife . . .’ She blocked my move. There was no bow this time – just an iron will that would not truck with dissent.
I gave in and followed her towards the door. What was it with Nagasakians and their insistent dealings with visitors?
We set off on the ‘tour’. Her initial pitch had been understandable but she now lapsed into virtual gibberish with an almost comical Japanese over-accent. She reminded me of a rather stern woman who had shown me round the Museum Dedicated to the Evil Work of the Imperialist Pig-Nation, America, in North Korea. (I don’t think that was the actual name but it was the gist of the place.) This tour was mind-blowingly bad. My housewife guide just approached every exhibit and read out the English blurb on the wall, but in a language that I didn’t recognize.
‘Vis fologlaf dispray effect of ladiation on wesidnt of rbble tin . . .’
If I tried to move too fast or look somewhere else, she would scold me and I’d be pulled back hard on the leash. It was hell.
I remember very little of the tour, as I spent most of the time trying to plot my escape. The one fact I did take in was that the bombs’ special antenna, which allowed them to register their altitude and to explode at precisely 500 metres, were invented by a Dr Yagi Hidetsugu, a Japanese scientist from Osaka.
My guide seemed to think that I would be fascinated by anything to do with Christianity. There was a little section of the museum – by far the least interesting, in my opinion – about a Japanese Christian who lived in the city at the time of the attack. There were moments when I felt that was where I was to spend the rest of my life, listening to a tiny, unintelligible woman waffle on about ‘Jesus Clist’.
She also had a tendency to go on and on about ‘enemy pranes’. While I accepted that they were the enemy to her, she was actually talking about my father and his friends and it started to really get on my nerves. I wandered off and read a notice informing me that, on the fiftieth anniversary of the bomb being dropped, the city of Nagasaki had bought the original colour footage of the bombing from the Hooper Institute in the US. Whatever the Japanese did in the war, I sort of thought that the Hooper Institute, whatever that might be, could have just given them the footage of their city being wiped off the map rather than selling it to them.
Eventually I couldn’t take it any more and told my guide that I was feeling ill and needed to leave immediately. Unfortunately she got very concerned – too concerned.
‘What is wong wiv you? Where is pain? I call doctor?’
‘No, no . . . I just need to go back to my hotel and rest a while. Thank you so much for your tour, though; it was . . . good.’
‘You sit down. I call doctor now.’ She got on her mobile and started jabbering away while motioning me to a nearby chair. I started to panic. I was never going to lose this infernal woman. She wouldn’t ever let me leave.
‘I speak to doctor – what is sympton?’ She held her hand over the speaker and kept the doctor hanging as she discussed my fate.
‘Please, I just want to go back to my hotel.’ I was almost shouting at this tiny woman, and several Japanese visitors to the museum wandered past tut-tutting.
‘OK, I tell doctor to come now . . .’ She started jabbering into the phone again. I looked around and saw some stairs just round the corner from where we were standing. The little lady was now deep in animated conversation with the doctor. I took my moment and bolted. I was up the stairs faster than Charlie Sheen out of rehab and I didn’t look back. I came to a fire escape and pushed it open. Alarms started to ring and a curious wailing siren, remarkably like an air-raid siren, sounded out.
Once you make the decision to run you must commit. The last thing you want is to be caught or bump into the other party concerned. Otherwise you have to start pretending you’ve lost your mind or are on strong hallucinogenics and it all spirals ever further out of control.
‘Oh, these tangled webs we weave . . .’
I could hear the siren wailing and could imagine my hyperactive little guide describing what was happening to a by now very confused doctor.
‘He bleak thlough door; silens they wail rike clazy coyote . . . Now he lunnning away like clazy man! We leed sedative gun fast . . .’
At the bottom of the hill I spotted a taxi and jumped in and we roared away as fast as the little Japanese Box could roa
r.
Back at the Monterey hotel I lay on the tiny bed in my tiny room for a while. The tiny pillow had something very weird inside it. It felt like beans. Not beans as in a beanbag; beanbags are quite comfortable. These felt like actual beans: uncomfortable, hard beans that needed to soak for forty-eight hours. Why would anyone put beans in a pillow?
There’s so much about Japan that I didn’t get. It’s a truly unfathomable place to the casual visitor. It’s a country obsessed with modernity and cutting-edge gadgetry and yet still so steeped in tradition and mythology. I wondered whether their relentless surge towards the future has made the Japanese cling to beliefs about things like monsters more than people in most countries. The shock of the new, the ‘Year Zero’ effect of the Second World War and the subsequent rapid modernization might have left them with a need to hang on to old superstitions. When your country is set on fire, nuked and invaded by a civilization that you then aspire to you must need something to blame for stuff . . . And maybe to make uncomfortable pillows for visitors by way of subtle revenge.
I headed out into town to try to find a YO! Sushi type of place. I wanted somewhere I could sit and watch food go past me on a conveyor belt, choosing whatever took my fancy. I got the name of the best one off the Internet and tried to give this to a cab driver. He wasn’t interested in my desired destination and dropped me off somewhere wholly wrong and quite insalubrious. I had learnt not to bother complaining to Japanese cabbies. I waited until he drove out of sight and then hailed another one and tried again. The new cab, driven by an elderly woman who seemed to have no idea how to change gears, took a look at the name of the place I wanted and took off. We drove for about twenty minutes and I soon knew that we were not going anywhere I wanted as we appeared to be leaving the centre of town. I decided to give up and simply go with the flow. Wherever this lady wished me to have supper would be where I did so. She eventually came to a stop down a tiny, smoky alley straight out of a kung-fu film. The electric door opened and she indicated that this was where I was going. It certainly wasn’t but I was now committed. I got out and she screeched off, leaving me alone in the alley. I half-expected a large gang of martial-arts clichés to suddenly appear out of the smoke and say, ‘So, Mr Jory, now we shall decide who is the master . . .’
The gang didn’t appear and I looked around to get my bearings. Most of the buildings were unpromising, with the occasional fire escape and a lot of dustbins. One door looked to be vaguely inviting, however. It had a light over it as though it expected people to stand there. I knocked and a little hatch opened at eye level. A grumpy pair of eyes stared suspiciously back at me. The owner of the eyes said something in Japanese. I looked puzzled and pointed at my mouth. There was a long pause and then the door swung open to reveal a man in stained chef-type clothes. This was a start. At least I hadn’t knocked on the door of some Yakuza heroin gang. Having said this, Chef, as I shall call him, looked very shifty, as though he had just been in the middle of doing something really terrible and had quickly hidden the evidence. The room was minuscule, like a cupboard (or a medium-sized Japanese hotel room). After a moment he indicated that I should enter. I hesitated but I spotted some beer under a table and I was thirsty and tired from my taxi adventures. I squeezed through the door and got past him. Between us there was not much room left for oxygen.
He stared at me for a very long time without doing anything. I wondered whether this might not be a terrible mistake. He pointed at a stool and I sat.
He produced a menu in Japanese. I looked at it helplessly.
‘Biru,’ I said in my fluent Japanese. He poured me a glass of beer and stared at me as I sipped it. It was very good beer. I raised my glass to him in a salute but he just stared at me as though sizing me up.
Amewica?’ he suddenly said in a very threatening manner.
Just what I needed: to be stuck in a cupboard down a back alley with a mad Japanese man who was going to blame me personally for the atomic destruction of his city.
‘No . . . not Amewica . . . Boo to the USA . . . No, I am from . . . Brazil . . .’ I’ve no idea why I plumped for Brazil. I suppose nobody dislikes the Brazilians. It did the trick, though.
‘BRAZIILLL!!!’ Chef was ecstatic. ‘Brazil, Rio, goal, Ronaldo . . .’ He had exhausted his whole Brazilian repertoire but he seemed happier than his homicidal appearance had started to suggest moments earlier.
‘Goal, Pelé, Amazon, São Paulo, Ronnie Biggs!’ I shouted, exhausting my own Brazilian knowledge and knowing as I said it that Ronnie Biggs wasn’t going to cut the mustard.
I was right: he looked confused.
I stopped being Brazilian and studiously pretended to look at the menu. Chef jabbered at me in Japanese in a manner that made me fairly certain that he was asking me what I fancied. What I actually fancied was getting out of here but I was stuck now and determined to go through with whatever was to come. I pretended to look indecisive for a moment before pointing at two things on the menu decisively. He looked at my two chosen things and then at me quizzically. He asked me something in Japanese that sounded a little like, ‘Are you sure, you flucking idyot?’
I nodded and indicated that, yes, this was definitely what I wanted – whatever it was. I then looked down and concentrated on my beer. I felt him continuing to look at me for quite a while before finally crouching down and starting to fiddle with stuff in a cupboard on his side.
After about five minutes he produced a bowl of what looked like raw cat sick and placed it in front of me. He then returned to his larder and fiddled a little bit more before producing a tiny bowl of slimy pickles. He then stood staring at me expectantly. Dinner was clearly served.
I looked at the meal and then up at Chef. Chef’s eyes moved fast from the cat sick to me and back again. I stalled for a while but very soon I had to face the inevitable. I looked down. The cat sick had a putrid fishy smell and it was becoming quite overpowering in the cupboard. I gingerly lifted my chopsticks and tried a pickle. They were not terrible – revolting, but edible. I smiled at Chef but he didn’t smile back. Chef looked at the cat sick again and then at me. I started to get hot and panicky. What if this actually was cat sick? Maybe that was what he was doing when I’d interrupted him? Forcing his fat fingers down some poor cat’s throat.
Eventually I could stall no longer; I had to dig in. I picked up a small amount of cat sick and reticently put it in my mouth. Like uranium, you clearly needed only a tiny amount for an explosive reaction. This was a taste so awful, so utterly heinous that I genuinely have no words to describe it. I suffered an instant gag reflex and found it almost impossible not to projectile vomit. Thankfully some inner survival mechanism made me keep it in. Chef did not appear to be a man who appreciated being vomited on. This was the secret ingredient they needed on the Bush Tucker Trial on I’m a Celeb . . . It would be TV gold.
Eventually I swallowed this fiendish mouthful but weird things lingered in my teeth. I looked up at Chef, who had a big smile on his face. Was he laughing at me or just pleased that I was enjoying his cat sick? I hate to say this but he was inscrutable.
I downed an entire glass of beer. There was nothing on God’s earth that would persuade me take another mouthful of that crap. I looked at him and did the X Factor sign with my arms to indicate that I was finished and wanted my bill. Chef looked at me in astonishment. He shook his head and pointed at the cat sick. I looked around subtly for any knives. There was a chopper lying on the counter about a foot away from him. I just wanted to get out of there and run away again.
Chef shouted something at me in a low guttural growl. I hated this situation. I didn’t want to be here so why was I here? I was a grown man. I didn’t have to do anything that I didn’t want to – but how to get out? For the second time in the same day I feigned terrible illness. Having just consumed the cat sick, this was not tricky. I grabbed my stomach and started to make terrible noises. Chef looked startled. I pulled out a 1,000-yen note, dropped it on the counter and then stood up, p
retending to stagger. I hit the door hard before sliding it open. I managed to get half into the alley but Chef grabbed me and was shouting stuff. This was becoming a terrible day. I pointed up to the sky and he let go for a second and I took my moment. I bolted, running as fast as I could, and I didn’t stop running for five minutes. When I eventually did, I vomited all over the pavement. I was certain that this was the moment where my guide from the museum would walk by but fortunately I was alone. A hollow husk, I hailed a taxi that I had to direct myself to the Monterey hotel for a night battling the evil pillow monster.
My time in Japan was running out. I had to get back to Tokyo the following day to catch my flight home without a sniff of a monster.
The next morning, I caught a cab to the station and, to my surprise, the driver asked me in polite, stilted English whether I minded if he chatted to me. He’d learnt his English from the Internet and was keen to practise it on somebody.
‘Sir, why are you visit Japan?’
‘I am here to hunt the Hibagon.’
‘Slow please . . . I no understand.’
‘I . . . am here . . . to find the Hibagon . . .’
‘Why are you in Japan? For tourist purpose?’
‘No . . . To hunt the Hibagon . . . The Hibagon – the monster . . .’